ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Ten facts about land systems for sustainability.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 58 papers.
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Who cites it
58 citing papers in PubMed, 398 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Five rules for scientifically credible nature markets.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Review
- Strategies reimagined: SDG-driven solutions for combating global desertification.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Pathway narratives towards a nature-positive European Union land system: operationalising the Nature Futures Framework for policy objectives.Sustainability science · 2026Article
- Causal machine learning methods for understanding land use and land cover change.Landscape ecology · 2026Review
- Forest Carbon Dynamics as a Constraint on Future Land-Use and Land-Cover Change.Global change biology · 2025Article
- India's agroecology programme, 'Zero Budget Natural Farming', delivers biodiversity and economic benefits without lowering yields.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Policy principles for sustainable and just land systems.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Empirical evidence supports neither land sparing nor land sharing as the main strategy to manage agriculture-biodiversity tradeoffs.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Can circularity support net-zero agriculture: an exploratory case.Animal frontiers : the review magazine of animal agriculture · 2025Article
- Review
- Review
- An aspirational approach to planetary futures.Nature · 2025Review
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Authors and funding
50 authors at 20 institutions in 20 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Land use is central to addressing sustainability issues, including biodiversity conservation, climate change, food security, poverty alleviation, and sustainable energy. In this paper, we synthesize knowledge accumulated in land system science, the integrated study of terrestrial social-ecological systems, into 10 hard truths that have strong, general, empirical support. These facts help to explain the challenges of achieving sustainability in land use and thus also point toward solutions. The 10 facts are as follows: 1) Meanings and values of land are socially constructed and contested; 2) land systems exhibit complex behaviors with abrupt, hard-to-predict changes; 3) irreversible changes and path dependence are common features of land systems; 4) some land uses have a small footprint but very large impacts; 5) drivers and impacts of land-use change are globally interconnected and spill over to distant locations; 6) humanity lives on a used planet where all land provides benefits to societies; 7) land-use change usually entails trade-offs between different benefits-"win-wins" are thus rare; 8) land tenure and land-use claims are often unclear, overlapping, and contested; 9) the benefits and burdens from land are unequally distributed; and 10) land users have multiple, sometimes conflicting, ideas of what social and environmental justice entails. The facts have implications for governance, but do not provide fixed answers. Instead they constitute a set of core principles which can guide scientists, policy makers, and practitioners toward meeting sustainability challenges in land use.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.